As a member of a minority group, this statement is sadly something we hear all the time if we object to people asking what should rationally otherwise be considered highly inappropriate questions. For example, just because someone is highly open about their sex life doesn't make asking a lesbian completely out of context how she has sex any more appropriate.
"Well, I would find it useful and be thankful"
Anyone who is a wheelchair user or has friends and family who are will probably know this one. People (strangers) have a habit of pushing wheelchairs around without asking the person within the chair first. Just because a currently abled body person might find the idea of someone helping them personally by pushing their chair if they used one, doesn't make it any more acceptable to completely ignore the wishes of a wheelchair user they don't know.
I understand what you're saying in general, but have no idea why you think it's a reply to what I said. I didn't say anything about asking questions. I talked about honoring preferences. Explaining why you have some preferences (about what questions you'd like asked) you'd like honored would seem to reinforce my point, rather than deny it.
maybe I had a flaw in my logic. I was trying to say that if you treat people according to your behavioral preferences (in my case, driving and task focused) then there is a good chance you will actually be introducing tension into the relationship - if they have a different style.
The golden rule is great for matters of ethics (i.e. I shouldn't steal from you), but it can cause tension when we discuss communication behaviors.
This concept shows up in a few books and was made popular by Tony Alessandra.
I think the difference is that while the Golden Rule deals with actions (equatable to "hard skills"), the Platinum Rule deals with behaviors (equatable to "soft skills"). The latter does not say "render unto others the actions that they most desire", but rather "given that you are going to perform an action, perform that action in the way that best matches the way the other person is most comfortable with". It is not about the ethics of an action, but rather, how to behave in ways that are most receivable by other people.
The "Platinum Rule" is wrong because it is impossible to follow. Even if my ethicals only included "do unto others as they want done to themselves" how would I resolve two fighting men each asking for assistance in subduing the other?
The reason the golden rule works is because it places you in the position of the other. If I accidentally killed someone due to carelessness, I would want myself to be imprisoned for some time.
If you intentionally killed someone due to racial hatred, you also wouldn't want yourself to be imprisoned for some time either. Nor if you recklessly killed someone due to tiredness and a desire to get home earlier.
Indeed. My point is that both metallic rules are insufficient to address conflicts with serious consequences. The only rule I know of which is both simple and sufficiently broad to deal with any conflict is the Iron Rule: "The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must". Yet that is utterly amoral.
First, far be it from me to claim that the Golden Rule, followed literally, is a sufficient ethics on its own. Try to treat it logically and it's easy to construct Asimov-esque "Laws of Robotics" situations in which the simple formulations, taken literally, create paradoxes quite easily. It is, in my opinion, clearly a rule that one is more meant to follow the spirit of than the letter of the law.
That said, I'd also observe that your rule,"do unto others as they want done to themselves", is not the same as my point. My point is that "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" itself already encompasses the idea of honoring preferences, on the grounds that you would already like your preferences honored. It isn't a free-floating rule that I would advocate you adding to your ethicals on its own, it's a second-order consequence of the already-existing Golden Rule.
The Golden Rule, while it does not proscribe an exact solution to your hypothetical, at least gives guidance, inasmuch as if you'd like to live in a just world, it implies that you should approach your hypothetical with justice in mind. Presumably you have not encountered a free-floating, context-free fight between two otherwise identical men who are for some mysterious reason asking you and you alone to resolve the fight in favor of one or the other, with no other options permitted.
(I dislike ethical hypotheticals, or at least, I dislike hypotheticals when people lose track of the fact that they are inevitably incredible, massive simplifications of any real situation you might experience. One should either highlight that the hypothetical is deliberately abstracted, in which case math-style logic-chopping is what is called for, or that it is intended to be a real question about a real situation in which case what is called for is almost certainly a logically-complicated set of "if-thens" to flesh out the hypothetical, with general understanding that there is no one "true" answer because there is no one "true" situation being given.)
It is, in my opinion, a very thin and perhaps downright sophmoric interpretation of the Golden Rule to read it hyper-literally and incredible "thinly" and apply it only to your own literal preferences about exactly what you'd like done to you this second. I say this to lay down a marker, not saying that you are necessarily doing that. For instance, it certainly does not mean that if you are hungry right now, your ethical imperative is to go around feeding everybody you see, regardless of their own state. It's deeper and richer than that... again, probably not deep and rich enough to be a full ethical system on its own (I don't think it is), but it's not that thin.
I'm perfectly comfortable with concision, thank you.
Clearly one can interpret the Golden Rule two ways depending on whether you take into account the other person's different values or not.
For example, you're probably patting yourself on the back for being "concise" despite using more words to praise your original comment than it would have taken to clarify it, whereas I'm resenting you for the way you've ostentatiously foregone social niceties at my expense.
Is that really what you would have wanted in my place? Despite your ability to parse it, I don't think you understand the Golden Rule very well.
